Want more reviews? Great reviews?
We all do. But there’s a limit to how we go about getting them.
The big seven Naughty Tactics
If you’re doing any of these, you could wind up (quickly) in Amazon’s Naughty Books (and yes, I have seen all of these):
Showing posts with label bad. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bad. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 11, 2015
Monday, November 24, 2014
Caution, Rant: spammy spammers spamming stupid “Children’s Books” in their KDP listing title.
Every once in a while, I’ve just got to rant. Maybe you know the feeling?
Today’s rant is about that growing breed of Kindle kids’ ebooks that have almost more title than actual book. I’m sure you know the ones: the cover of the book has maybe a five-word title, but the title of the book as shown on its Amazon listing is a mile long, like this:
Children books : MARGARET AND THE DONUT: (Explore the Galaxy kids book exclusive collection) (Super-Duper eBook)Sleep & Playtime Books(Short Story) (Bedtime ... Books for Babby & Toddler Readers #15) [Kindle Edition]
You think I’m joking?
Thursday, October 30, 2014
Dear Amazon, what’s up with my Kindle prices?
How much thought do you put into pricing your books?
If you’re like me, it’s a lot. Which is why it finally drove me around the bend that Amazon has been changing all my prices, without even asking nicely.
When you’re pricing a book, you probably pick a nice, clean number with a 99 on the end, a suffix that is invisible to consumers. If a book is $8.74 (unless it’s clearly marked down, like from $9.99), it’ll stand out and look weird.
Know how I know? Because for a long time, I’ve noticed that Amazon prices for my KDP ebooks look terrible. They totally jump off the page. Oh, they’re close to the numbers I’ve picked… but not exactly. And that has slowly been driving me mad.
Just to pick a few titles at random, the prices were $5.11, $1.12, $5.14, $1.13. Those are terrible numbers, numbers that jump off the page and make a buyer reluctant to buy. That’s very frustrating, especially because I KNEW I’d priced them at $4.99, 99 cents, $4.99 and 99 cents.
Why bother planning your prices if they’re just going to change, am I right?
What’s going on here?
I eventually found out why this happens. If you’re outside the United States, Amazon can tell from your browser’s IP address, and they adjust the price you see accordingly. Without telling me, Amazon has been detecting my computer’s location and adjusting the prices accordingly.
At least there’s some GOOD news: buyers inside the U.S. will most likely see the right prices for your books, namely, the ones you’ve so carefully chosen in KDP’s dashboard.
To test this, I ran my author page through two “anonymizers,” sites that hide your current IP address so nobody can tell where you’re surfing from. One was in Europe and one was in the U.S.
Here’s what the pricing looks like from each location:
Sunday, September 14, 2014
Should you crowdfund your next book (on Kickstarter, GoFundMe, or PubSlush)? 3 reasons why not.
Should you crowdfund your next book (on Kickstarter, GoFundMe, or PubSlush or whatever tomorrow’s Next Big Crowdfunding Site happens to be)?
No.
Well, that was easy, wasn’t it?
Now we can all go home.
What? You want me to defend that statement?
Well, okay. Here are three reasons.
#1 Your crowdfunding project makes me feel spiteful.
I’m not saying this to be nasty, I promise.
I love you, I love writers, I want to encourage independent writers to get their books in print and live their dream. Really… I do.
But if you publicize your crowdfunding project in writers’ circles, you’re going to get a LOT of people staring at your post, thinking, “I paid to publish my books, darnit; you should pay to publish yours.”
Either that or they’re just plain bored.
Bored with writers who hang out online on facebook, LinkedIn, and anywhere else writers hang out, telling me to fund their book… when they ought to be writing.
Another question that may just cross our mind when you announce your crowdfunding attempt:
Wednesday, August 27, 2014
Are editors and agents sick of YOUR book? 11 things they don’t want to see.
Is your story perfect?
Wait!
Don’t hit the send button just yet.
Before you email (or snail mail) that manuscript, make sure you aren’t sending an editor (or agent) a book she’s already sick of seeing.
It’s not like it’s tough to read their minds. Editors, agents and other publishing professionals are out there giving interviews. They are sitting down with bloggers and newspaper / magazine writers, mostly begging us (as writers) to please not send them certain books.
Which books?
Let’s listen to what they’re saying for a minute. Can you hear them all?
Straight from the horses’ mouths, here’s what all those editors and agents are utterly, completely, and totally sick of…
Books that rhyme.
1. Rhyme. “I am SICK of seeing rhyming picture books with bad meter and rhyme. Ugh. Is there anything worse? No. No, there’s not.” – editor Josh Plattner, via Writers’ Rumpus.
Sunday, June 8, 2014
Twelve steps to writing an awful kids’ book.
Mea culpa. I have been there and I have done that. I have written awful children’s books; not just book but books, plural. And no amount of “Hail Mary”s can fix the bad writing I’ve done (plus, I’m not Catholic).
Phew. Feels good to get it off my chest. These days, I sometimes turn up an old file on my hard drive and open it up, only to discover an ugly early attempt at a kids’ story. I’m nowhere near perfect yet, but it has become easier, at least, to spot where all those early attempts went wrong.
If I ever wanted to write an awful kids’ book again, let’s just say I now know all the steps to get me there. And having been there and done that, I’m happy to share this twelve-step plan to help you, too, create a children’s book that truly stinks.
What? You want to write a great kids’ book?
Don’t worry… for each of these twelve steps, I’ve offered a few tips (many from painful personal experience) on how to do it right. You know… just in case you want to write this book:
Instead of this one:
You decide which you want to write… and then follow these twelve simple tips.
Sunday, April 27, 2014
Photo picture books: good, bad, UGLY.
(Photo credit: Albert Kok, Wikimedia)
Yet photo-based picture books are a long tradition, going almost back to the beginning of both. And we cannot all dive to the bottom of the seas to take our own pictures of sharks… nor is there any need to, with good-quality stock photos and (high-quality! read my post!) internet photos.
So I decided to search through Amazon to find out exactly what’s out there these days: the good, bad, and ugly in kids’ picture books that are based around photos. But not in that order!
Books illustrated with photos tend to come from the non-fiction end of the spectrum… but not entirely, as we’ll see in a couple of the examples below. They can be found both in slick professionally-published versions and some good, bad and loathsome self-pubbed editions.
Monday, February 24, 2014
5 reasons you’d be dumb to fund this indigogo project.
Does anybody really fund these things, anyway? Or just click Like and pass them around? I suppose somebody must, but some of the projects are just sheer dumbness, like this group who’s put together The Wikipedia Books Project to… print out Wikipedia. The whole thing.
Yes, the encyclopedia that has effectively put print encyclopedias out of business… now back in print!
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